At the crossroads: Have a dream? Pursue it

BACK OF THE BOOK

Pobronson's earlier books-bombardiers, the fast-paced non-stop novel set in the shark-infested world of investment banking, and Nudist On The Late Shift, the compelling non-fiction account that captured the spirit, the fervour and the failures that marked the boom and bust of Silicon Valley's dotcom-led revolution-demonstrate his style. Speedy and uncompromising prose that's a breeze to read. What Should I Do With My Life? is no exception. But unlike Bombardiers and Nudist, this book began at a point of inflexion in the author's own life. His career as a writer was under threat: the mainly 'new economy' magazines he wrote for were thinning down, his book editor had quit and he was soon to become a father for the first time.

This was when Bronson, partly on a quest for his own guidance, started talking to people. Nine hundred of them, drawn from across the US, across hierarchies and socio-economic classes. In the book, Bronson presents the stories of 50 of them, all of whom have tried to unearth their true calling-some successfully and others not.

What Should I Do With My Life By Po Bronson Random House PP: 370 Price: Rs 1,240

'Dream. Lockbox. Fuck You money. Dream.' Familiar with that formula? You must be. Indeed, many of us may be harbouring that formula in our minds, secretly hoping it comes true. A career journalist whose real ambition is to become a rock music critic, a banker who really wants to teach pre-primary school kids, a physician who actually wants to make it as a professional billiards player... there are no limits to dreams. Only, they rarely work out the way the formula suggests: have a Dream, lock it up and forget about it; then, go out and make piles of money that will enable you to give up your day job (or any job for that matter) and pursue your Dream. How many people do you know who could do that (by the way, Sabeer Bhatia doesn't count)?

Not surprisingly, Bronson too couldn't find too many people who made it happen that way. But he found scores of others who did it the other way. The blue collar construction worker who dreamt of going to college and getting an MBA, but ended up losing his job and house, and then scratched his way back up there, establishing his own non-conventional energy source business. Bronson's success stories usually involve people who've downshifted to find their true calling in life: the woman in tech pr who becomes a landscape gardener, the corporate lawyer who becomes a long-haul truck driver, the diplomat who becomes a school teacher and so on. And the failures. The movie production executive who chucks it up, graduates from medical school and then finds that he doesn't like his new life where he's constantly with sick people. Or the successful screenwriter who wants to pursue his dream of writing novels, but ends up ghost-writing a friend's biography.

People at the crossroads is what Bronson's book is about. With large dollops of personal angst thrown in, his accounts are mainly of people in their 20s and 30s, plus a few middle-aged people for good measure. While some of these accounts may be inspirational (only, of course, if you're out of a banking job and seriously want to pick up that old sax lying in your attic), readers may find a somewhat similar pattern emerging from each of the 50 experiences that Bronson recounts. And that could make the otherwise peppy prose a trifle boring. But you know what I really like about Bronson's most recent effort? He's used the experiences of 50 people who wanted to change their lives to change his own. By making a book out of it. The medium most certainly is the message!

Sack The CEO By Jeetendra Jain Vikas Publishing House PP: 250 Price: Rs 245

Does it? You might enjoy the unedifying irony of some of Jain's depictions and the juvenile buffoonery that goes by way of CEO-choking stratagems. But petty nepotism, cronyism, cash-siphoning and the like are far too insipid as shenanigans to sustain interest.

Thinking For A Change By John C Maxwell Warner Books PP: 266 Price: Rs 563

Some gall, you'd say. ''Change your thinking,'' proposes John Maxwell's book, ''Change Your Life.'' Straight up. With no trace of self-consciousness, let alone flinching. In America, accustomed to its bard from Duluth-upon-Lake-Superior yodelling 'Gonna change my way of thinkin' with a guitar, this sort of advice gets lost in all the self-help babble. But here in India, it could drop a party-hall silent.

Achieving Your Dream Career By Geoff Morgan & Andrew Banks Penguin Books PP: 294 Price: Rs 295

''One of the reasons people don't achieve their dreams is that they want to change their results without changing their thinking,'' says Maxwell, a pastor-turned-leadership-mentor. But just when you'd turn to flee a preachy yawn-fest, he mentions a rodeo rider who reloaded his mind with psycho-cybernetics and hit stardom.

Nor is the book conformist on matters of authority. It challenges popular thinking and champions big picture thinking, all the way from Eratosthenes, who calculated the Earth's circumference, to Einstein, who said, ''The problems of today cannot be solved on the same level of thinking we were when we created them.'' Thinking, writes the author, should be big, but also focused, strategic, creative, reflective, shared, unselfish, bottomline-oriented and realistic. ''I never give 'em hell,'' he quotes former US president Harry Truman as saying, ''I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.''

This other self-help book, by two recruitment professionals, is much less dramatic in its plainspeaking. A dream job, it posits, must certainly offer a challenge, but other than that, it must do justice to the individual's value system (expressed as motivations), skill set, workplace preference and enjoyment. Working instead towards a system-projected ideal is a misery trap. As the British psychologist Karen Horny says, the more we move towards our 'ideal self', the more we restrict ourselves.